


The Sea Puzzles

by orithea



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orithea/pseuds/orithea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The cliffs are dangerous, all sharp white angles, and sometimes John stands at the edge and wonders what it would be like to tip over, fall into the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sea Puzzles

**Author's Note:**

> More practicing pushing myself out of my comfort zone of many words and lots of plot.
> 
> [Justgot1](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Justgot1/pseuds/Justgot1) has been doing lovely things with [this random sentence generator](http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/randomsentence/randomsentence.aspx) so I gave it a try. Out popped "The sea puzzles." and I ran with it.

John went to Dover every summer when he was a boy. They had family there—his mother’s sister, who had two children, too. Twins just like him and Harry, though they were both girls, and two years older.

“Why can’t we go to a proper beach?” The water here is cold (“Bracing,” they say. “Miserable,” he counters.), and no one wants to stick more than a toe in it for long. “That’s not the point, dear,” his mother tells him each time. “Now be careful. Go play with the girls.”

The cliffs are dangerous, all sharp white angles, and sometimes John stands at the edge and wonders what it would be like to tip over, fall into the sea. He gets dizzy from it, pulls back sharply and crumples to the ground with relieved laughter on his lips and blades of grass prickling the skin of his back through the thin cotton of his shirt.

He doesn’t think of it for years, a long forgotten memory, until Sherlock. John looks into Sherlock’s eyes and sees shifting waters, sees that freezing North Sea lapping at the rocks of the shore. In Sherlock, the sea puzzles.

With his clothes on the floor and his body stretched out in long lines on crisp sheets Sherlock is the cliff face all over again—smooth white planes and crags, dotted with the brown flint of freckles here and there, shoulder blades jutting out so sharply that John’s skin twinges with the memory of the time he stumbled and skinned his knee on knife-peaked chalk.

_Don’t get too close to the edge!_

John pulls Sherlock into him, against him, pushes and pulls inside. Their mouths meet, desperate, and this time John lets go, falls, exhilarated, into the sea.


End file.
